sexta-feira, 6 de dezembro de 2013

A failure in communicating the impact of new findings

I was disappointed by the recent summary for policymakers (SPM)
of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) assessment
report 5, now that I finally got around to read it. Not so much because
of the science, but because the way it presented the science.
The report was written by top scientists, so what went wrong?
I guess we need to recognise the limitations of the format of the
SPM, and the constraints that they have to work under (word by word
approval from 190 country representatives) may not have been helpful
this time. The specified report length, combined with attempts from lots
of people to expand on the content, may have complicated the process.
My impression is that the amount of information crammed into this report was more important than making a few strong messages.
The SPM really provides a lot of facts, but what do all those numbers
mean for policy makers? There was little attempt to set the findings in
a context relevant for decision making (ranging from the national scale
to small businesses).
It is difficult to write a summary for a report that has not yet been
published, and for that reason, the SPM is cluttered by technical
details and discussions about uncertainty and confidence which have a
better place in the main report.
The authors of the SPM are experts at writing scientific papers, but
that is a different skill to writing for non-scientists. Often, the
order of presentation for non-scientists is opposite to the way papers
are presented in sciences.
A summary should really start with the most important message, but
the SPM starts by discussing uncertainties. It is then difficult for
non-scientists to make sense of the report. Are the results reliable or
not?
I asked myself after reading the SPM – what’s the most important
finding? If the IPCC hoped for good press coverage, I can imagine all
journalists asking the same question.
My recommendation is that next time, the main report is published before the SPM. That way, all the space used on uncertainty and confidence in the SPM could be spared.
I also recommend that people who decide the structure of future SPMs
and undertake the writing take a course effective writing for
non-scientist. At MET Norway, we have had such writing lessons to
improve our communication skills, and I have found this training
valuable.
It takes some training to find more popular ways to describe science and spot excessive use of jargon. Many words, such as ‘positive feedback‘
have different meanings if you talk to a scientist or a non-scientist
(a bad phrase to use in the context of climate change for people with
very little science background). Also the word ‘uncertainty‘ is not a good choice – what does it mean really?
There are some examples of how the report could be written in a better way: The European Academies of Science Advicory Council (EASAC) followed a different strategy, where the main report was published before the summary,
and hence the summary could be written as a summary and with a more
coherent structure and a stronger connection to the reports target
group.
The World Bank report of last year also comes to my mind – I think that is a much clearer form of presentation.
If I could have my way, I would also suggest that IPCC’s main reports
in the future come with supporting material that includes the necessary
data (extracted for the plotting purposes, but with meta-data providing
the complete history of post-processing) and source code for generating
all the figures in the report.
One way to do that could to use so-called ‘R-packages’ as suggested by Pebesma et al (2012) (PDF).
It would also be good if future assessment reports pay more attention
to replicating important results as a means of verification or
falsification.